Embodiments herein generally relate to printing systems and more particularly to systems and methods that automatically calculate the compatibility of different printers and print drivers and produce a compatibility matrix of such devices and drivers.
In large-scale enterprise printing environments, one challenge is to keep printing costs to a minimum, while not impacting the day-to-day productivity of the employees. Part of that challenge involves ensuring that users can print successfully. Once a user submits a print job, and it does not successfully print, there could be many reasons why the print job was unsuccessful. There may be physical problems with the printer, or network issues that prevent the print job from successfully printing. Or, in environments where a print control system is employed, the print job may be blocked from printing for violating some policy.
Normally, when a print job is unsuccessful, the user needs to resolve the issue, either by calling the help desk and requesting help, or resubmitting the print job to a different device. The job will be spooled again before being sent to the new choice of printer. For large jobs, the repeated process of spooling could take significant time, and impact critical print server resources.
Current solutions require manual setup of redirection rules, and do not ensure that the alternate printer is compatible with the original. Instead, determination of compatibility is left to the user who configured the system. This requires ongoing maintenance to ensure new printers are compatible, and existing redirection rules are accurate. Other solutions force the use of a generic universal print driver, which restricts the functionality of the devices, in order to enable redirection between printers. This is also expensive to implement.